July 14
19The Sovereign Lord is my strength.
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights. (Habakkuk 3:19, The Jesus Bible)
Greetings family. I pray this message finds you in good health, in great spirits, and in a respite from this summer heat. I hope you have some time today, because this post will be a dosie, as I need to get y’all caught up on the last week.
We, the Z family of 5, just took our first full family vacation in almost two years, and we returned to the place where our family loves to spend the most time: the mountains.
There is nowhere that I see the glory of God more than in the mountainous landscapes. I am not a big traveler, but I have been blessed to have witnessed, with my own eyes, a handful of breathtaking mountain ranges: from skiing down the mighty Rockies in my 20s, to flying over the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains in Afghanistan, to spending many summers in the peaks and valleys of the Appalachians, my preferred vacation is always around a mountain range. This year, we were blessed with the opportunity to take a vacation up to the Helen, Georgia area to go tubing down the Chattahoochie River. Two years ago, when celebrating our son’s fifth birthday, we had finally made a trip to Helen and fell in love with this Bavarian Alpine town. If you have never been, it is well worth the trip. Helen is a tourist trap, but it is visibly unique and the people are extremely friendly. The town was bustling with visitors and I am not sure if I love the city more in the winter or the summer. I am sure that there is probably never a bad time to visit Helen. In the warmer months, you get to experience what we just did: a relaxing ride down the Chattahoochie‘, a city in full bloom with gorgeous fauna everywhere you look, and friendly, bustling staff relishing the rush of tourism. In the cooler months, especially mid-September through the first week of November, the city is decked out for Oktoberfest (Helen’s busiest season), and I can imagine the buildings are gorgeous during their Christmas celebration. If you have the ability, and live in the southeastern United States, I highly recommend taking a trip.
This week Mrs. Z introduced a new word to me: majestical. When she first used it, I laughed and thought she was making up adjectives. But, alas, my limited vocabulary was stuck in the narrowness that I always just used the word majestic when choosing that specific descriptor. What we experienced in our first two days of our short vacation was purely majestical. The sweeping views of the rolling foothills, deer bounding along the mountainside, fireflies lighting up the night, beautiful summer days where the heat was tolerable and the nights still cool. Floating down the “hootch” was such a wonderful way to slow time down. That river meanders along, and unless you force the speed, it’s a pleasant pace while relaxing in an intertube.
I was enjoying the glory of God all around us: the joy in my children’s eyes, the way my son just lounged back, the way my daughter gazed everywhere. It was my children that pointed out all the ugliness we people had scarred the landscape with. There was your typical trash sporadically lining the shore, but what was surprisingly disgusting was the discarded diapers we saw sitting on the top of rocks. Granted we only saw two in a two mile stretch, but it was enough to remind me of the complete disregard some of us have for the environment, and for others. Of course, what is the use of complaining about a problem if we do nothing to correct it. What I should have done was once we reached the end of the tubing adventure, we could have run to a corner store, grabbed a couple of gloves and trashbags, and have Mrs. Z drive us to a spot upriver where we could have entered and then walked the shore cleaning up all the discarded waste ruining the pristine riverbed. I observed one good citizen doing such underneath a bridge, where she was picking up waste. But alas, we did nothing to help others on our vacation, so we’ll be scheduling a day in these last few weeks of summer to do some environmental clean-up in areas around us, which demonstrates our love for God, by protecting and caring for the natural world, the world God created.
Half of our vacation was marred by disaster when the baby, SGZ3, caught what we assume is this current strand of Norovirus, which keeps having spikes of outbreaks. The poor baby had such a rough night on the second of our three night stay that we rushed her to the nearest Emergency Room. She is on the mend now, but the virus has made its way to SGZ1, Mrs. Z, and myself. During this time of recovery we have been watching my favorite children’s show: Bluey.
If you have never seen an episode, you are really missing out. These cute, hilarious, motivational cartoons have become a cultural phenomenon. If there was ever a perfect example of how to be amazing parents, just watch Bluey. The Father, Bandit, is an earthly example of the loving Father we have in Heaven. Bandit does whatever he needs to keep his daughters, Bluey and Bingo, happy, but not when it threatens teaching them to be responsible young pups. The best reflection of this truth can be seen in one of my favorite episodes: “Daddy Robot”. In this episode, Bandit entertains the kids’ controlling him being “Daddy Robot”, but when his daughters try to use him to do their job of cleaning up the play area, the writers of the show do a majestical job in how Bandit teaches his daughters a lesson to last their entire life.
I bring up Bluey because, during our period of recovery from Norovirus, we watched the episode “Born Yesterday”, where Bandit plays the game of the same name with Bluey and Bingo, pretending he was “born yesterday”. Below is a short clip of what makes this show so fun. I wish I could show you my favorite part of this episode, which comes shortly after the clip below ends. Bandit holds a leaf up and stares at the majestic beauty of this simple piece of nature. Although in this point of the short cartoon, Bandit does not say a word, viewers can recognize that Bandit sees the wonder in the natural beauty in the small things around him. That same wonder settled on me when watching the fireflies light up each evening. I saw that wonder in my son’s face when he was explaining all the amazing gems he found when “panning for gold”. I saw that wonder in my oldest’s eyes when she recalled the moment a young fawn went running out of the brush right in front of her horse, giving the horse a spook, but SGZ1 was able to keep her calm and get her back on the trail.
We have just two weeks of summer left. I hope y’all found some time to explore the natural world around you, to enjoy this perfect planet God gifted us with. Now we need to do all we can to protect it, to repair the damages we have done as the human species.
During our drive to north Georgia, we listened to the latest episode of The Holy Post, which I have not shared in a long time. I have not been listening to them recently, but the conversation Phil Viscer, Skye Jethani, and Kaitlyn Schiess have at the beginning of the episode is an important reminder of what being a Christian should be about in terms of hospitality.
We also were able to catch up on last week’s sermon from Pastor Steven Furtick titled “Challenge The Shadow”. With a title like that, you can be sure this was quite the sermon. Click below to discover for yourself. Mrs. Z and I are super excited because we are less than a week away from experiencing the power of Elevation in person when they come to Savannah, GA for the first time.
Finally, a whole week of new music has come and go. There is too much to share on here, you’ll just have to discover for yourself. But to close out this post, I will share my favorite: a new single from the great Mr. Phil Wickam.
Common Sense Reborn 